This invention relates generally to educational tools and more particularly to reading machines which are used as part of a remedial reading program to assist individuals with learning disabilities.
As it is known in the art, reading machines have been used to improve the educational attainment of individuals with learning disabilities. In general, known reading machines are computer based. That is, the reading machines often include a personal computer having specialized software that provides the reading machine function. In addition, the reading machines include other PC type components such as a monitor, an audio system, a disk or mass storage device, and a keyboard. In general, specialized software processes an input source document and generates synthetic speech to enable a user to hear the computer read through the document a word, line, sentence etc. at a time. Often these reading machines include a scanner to provide one technique to input source documents to the reader.
The scanner scans a document and provides an image file representation of the document to the personal computer. The personal computer using optical character recognition software produces an OCR file including generated text information. The OCR file is used by display system software to display a text-based representation of the scanned document on a monitor. The OCR file text is also used by speech synthesis software to synthesize speech. In addition, the known systems also place a highlight on a unit of text representation of the document. The highlight is typically a sentence or paragraph as selected by the user.
One problem, therefore, with the known systems is that the visual display that is presented to the user is a character or OCR based representation of the scanned document having a single highlight. With the single highlight there is no visual association of the spoken text to the highlight.